Rise Above - JK Flesh - EDLX048

Justin K. Broadrick’s output is an intimidating one. Not because it is so incredibly raucous and dirty-sounding, for the most part. It’s just that there is so much of it. His earliest venture began, aged 15, with the recording of his first—and last—record with Napalm Death. From there he formed pioneering industrial metal group Godflesh, who released a slew of seminal albums on Earache throughout the ’90s. In the meantime he’d met Kevin Martin, AKA The Bug, and began experimenting with everything from dub and techno to hip-hop, breakbeat and rowdy ambience as Techno Animal.

Together they produced four albums under the moniker, plus a collaboration with Porter Ricks, ultimately bowing out on the monolithic ‘The Brotherhood Of The Bomb’ for Matador in 2001.
In 1999 Broadrick founded Avalanche Recordings, which would serve as an outlet for some of his more expansive millennial work, namely as Final, Jesu and JK Flesh. Jesu was born from the ashes of Godflesh, a deeply genuine and emotional project that channeled all the raw anguish of his former band into more contemplative post-industrial and shoe-gazing song-structures. Final, a minimal ambient-guitar project—which actually pre-dates Godflesh—was recently picked up by Downwards, who put out the seven-track double vinyl ‘Black Dollars’ at the start of 2016. They backed ‘Nothing Is Free’ next, complete with Surgeon remix, credited this time to Broadrick’s JK Flesh guise. There’s also the somber and ethereal Pale Sketcher alias, which grew out of a remix album of Jesu material on Ghostly International.

JK Flesh debuted proper in 2012 with the album ‘Posthuman’ on 3BY3, but it’s lineage can be traced right back to Kevin“K-Mart” Martin and the pair’s psychedelic industrial techno project, The Sidewinder, which was picked up by Mille Plateaux in 1996. The studio pet-name would later become his surly alter-ego, as Broadrick explained to Resident Advisor in a 2012 interview: “Any remix I would do which had beats that were hard and involved any form of noise or sense of foreboding or threat, I would use the JK Flesh moniker. JK Flesh is the angry, hateful, disenchanted side of what I do with electronic beat-driven, bass-driven music. It’s got a lot more to boot.” And it does. There’s been the stinging ‘Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination’ since, a split with Dominick Fernow as Prurient, and this year’s ‘Suicide Estate’ EP on Fernow’s own Hospital Productions. Now Electric Deluxe has the honour of bringing the next unrelenting JK Flesh album kicking and screaming into the world. Batten down the hatches and prepare for a perilous ride.